As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.
Al Gore
My duty is to make probable the improbable. If I tell you how I did it, I will ruin your experience.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns.
Algernon Blackwood
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotle
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
Arthur Conan Doyle
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
Barack Obama
The truth is, he almost wasn't a senator at all. In 1972, shortly after his improbable victory, but before he took the oath of office, my father went to Washington to look at his new office space. My mom took us to go buy a Christmas tree. On the way home, we were in an automobile accident. My mom, Neilia, and my sister, Naomi, were killed.
Beau Biden
Even if America entered the war, it is improbable that the Allied armies could invade Europe and overwhelm the Axis powers. But one thing is certain. If England can draw this country into the war, she can shift to our shoulders a large portion of the responsibility for waging it and for paying its cost.
Charles Lindbergh
Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.
Chris Carter
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
Christopher Reeve
At first, dreams seem impossible, then improbable, and eventually inevitable.
'Horse Soldiers' is the untold story of how a small band of U.S. Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan in 2001, just five weeks after September 11, saddled up on horses, and rode to an improbable victory against a vastly larger Taliban and Al Qaeda army.
Doug Stanton
The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.
Douglas Adams
It is nearly always the most improbable things that really come to pass.
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you.
Elizabeth Warren
In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.
Elliott Abrams
For an entrepreneur with 'improbable' and 'impossible' dreams, the alleged stability that comes from getting 'a real job' is nothing but a sign of slavery.
Fabrizio Moreira
Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.
Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of 'The Book of Mormon,' the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central's 'South Park,' are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.
'Thirteen Orphans' is the name of a specific limit hand. The same combination is also called 'Thirteen Improbable.' Once I'd decided I wanted to write a tale where mah-jong would be at the heart, I also knew I wanted to use limit hands.
Remember, I'm someone who got fired from Disney and eight days later started the first studio in 65 years with two of the most brilliant, successful people in the history of the entertainment business, doing something everyone said was somewhere between improbable and impossible. I'm afraid that's exactly what I love doing.
It's far easier to brush off death if the death in question seems impossible or improbable as a personal threat.
From the sense of being an ambassador for Jesus Christ, hopefully, through my story and through all the improbables and the miracles that happened in my life, people are inspired or at least a little bit warmer to the idea of exploring who Jesus is.
It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.
Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
The ANC was the product of a much earlier South Africa, a gradualist and non-tribal multi-racial organisation, driven to violence by the intransigence of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government, obsessed with improbable ideas of revolution.
It seems hopelessly improbable that any particular rules accidentally led to the miracle of intelligent life. Nevertheless, this is exactly what most physicists have believed: intelligent life is a purely serendipitous consequence of physical principles that have nothing to do with our own existence.
For me to want to be an actor was an improbable idea. I wasn't beautiful or pretty in any conventional way. I wasn't an ingenue at 22. But I was always certain of it and certain of its power. I felt the power when I went to the theater at 9, 10, 12 and 14.
In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.
Today, in 2011, I'm giving Secretary Hillary Clinton the nod as the Obama Administration's improbable MVP in the technology realm.
As a hopeless romantic, I'm drawn to stories of improbable beginnings.
There are improbable things suspended in space, like the earth.
I love when stories have something a little magical in them, and there's wonder and curiosity. Somewhere there are people living these improbable stories, and our job is to go out and find them and bring them to the page. And so, the more surprising, the more uplifting, the more sort of even inspiring a story is, I find myself gripped by those.
The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable.
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
I am writing a book more improbable than 'The Interrogative Mood' that I call 'Manifesto'. It's two guys talking who speak artificially conveniently.
Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.
I always try to find a story in the margins of history, but I don't like to do too much that's improbable.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
I have a huge admiration for the ability of people to go, 'I don't care if it can't happen. I don't care if you say it's impossible. I am gonna do it anyway.' I think it's an amazing part of human nature. It feeds into faith and belief in human beings to not only do the improbable but almost the impossible.
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
I'd always liked movies in a kind of naive way. They seemed no less improbable a career than anything else.
